Mark Zuckerberg doesn't readily offer himself up for media interviews. But over the summer the 26-year-old co-founder of Facebook met up with the New Yorker magazine for several interviews, resulting in an exhaustive 6,000-word feature.

Going from "Zuck's" adolescence spent building private Instant Messaging (IM) services across his parent's network of computers to the ill-advised college IMs that threatened to prove his undoing, the New Yorker's Jose Antonio Vargas has an insightful take on the man he calls "the boy king of Silicon Valley."

It's worth reading in full – not least as an addendum if you're planning to go see The Social Network, the film about the Zuckerberg due to be released next month – but here's a few sharp takes.

In a selection of IMs leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend how his Harvard peers ("dumb fucks") trusted him by submitting personal information when signing up to his social network. A conversation he now says he "absolutely" regrets:

"If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right? I think I've grown and learned a lot."

Zuckerberg goes on to distance himself from his younger self: "I think a lot people will look at that stuff, you know, when I was 19, and say, 'Oh, well, he was like that ... He must still be like that, right?'"

Barely 12 months after launch, Facebook began attracting interest from execs big players in the media and technology world, one of which was Yahoo. Terry Semel, Yahoo's former chief executive, who reportedly offered Zuckerberg close to $1bn for the social network in 2006 told Vargas: "I'd never met anyone – forget his age, 22 the or 26 now – I'd never met anyone who would walk away from $1bn. But he said, 'It's not about the price. This is my baby and I want to keep running it, I want to keep growing it.' I couldn't believe it."

And on privacy? Zuckerberg sticks to his line: "A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep that we make and turn it into as big a deal as possible."